Eternal Crusade Review

Eternal Crusade is described by its marketing as â€œan adrenaline-fueled gameâ€ that will be â€œcatering to a global audience of mid to hardcore gamers.â€ Playing the game itself, however, it is difficult to see how either of these statements is true.

In Eternal Crusade, the player picks a hero and builds up a squad of mercenaries. Mercs range from curiously momentary inclined monsters, to plain old human fighters. Mercs are super varied and building a team is enjoyable.

Eternal Crusade is almost devoid of actual gameplay. Despite looking a lot like a classic grid-based RPG, a la Final Fantasy Tactics, the player has next to no control over combat in Eternal Crusade.

The only thing the player does in combat is tap buttons to use special abilities when they charge up. A target canâ€™t even be chosen. Some battles later in the game can be extremely long. Spending 5-6 minutes tapping a button and watching combat play out gets very dull.

Every merc feels exactly the same and elemental properties donâ€™t seem to matter too much. Like most games of this type, characters can be levelled up with items looted from battle and evolved into stronger versions. Unfortunately, the majority of these fighters just attack enemies in slightly different ways. The only true difference between monsters is if they can heal or not. Still, the great graphics of the game make it fun to see what monster or cute fighter will be revealed next.

Since battles are entirely automatic, there are literally no tactics to be employed. What enemies are attacked and if the AI is smart enough to do things like focus its fire or match elements to weak enemies is completely out of the playerâ€™s hands. Battle tends to devolve into a flurry of animations that make it difficult to follow whatâ€™s going on or whatâ€™s effective against what. This doesnâ€™t really matter though, because the game is very focused on pay to win. Either the player wins the battle or they lose through no fault of their own and must grind previous battles for items to boost their fighters. Of course the cash shop has boosts for sale and the game isnâ€™t shy about its freemium tendencies.

Eternal Crusade looks very nice indeed. Some excellent artwork and imaginative monsters really give the game a cool anime look. Everything in the game is bright, colourful and varied. The sound is very good as well. Combat sounds impressive, as do spells. Music is well done as well. Eternal Crusadeâ€™s excellent presentation is its only redeeming feature.

Eternal Crusade is not an enjoyable game at all. It lacks any real gameplay, its stat boosting system has been done better on Android many times and there is just little fun to be found in it. Check out Brave Frontier or Slash of the Dragon for a much more fun experience.

Eternal Crusade Review Rundown

8

Graphics/Sound - Eternal Crusade looks really good and sounds great as well. Seeing what cool monster or warrior appears next is one of the few fun parts of the game.

6

Controls - A poor tutorial and awkward interface quirks make navigating Eternal Crusade harder than it needs to be.

4

Gameplay - Eternal Crusade lacks any real gameplay. Boosting monsters is not fun and battles are quite boring after a while.

4

Replay Value - With no good gameplay Eternal Crusade will not be interesting for long.

4.0

Overall - Eternal Crusade is a very poor game. There are much, much better collection RPG's on Android.